Reports from Ubuntu Developer Summit Highlight Major Momentum

This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is going on in Oakland, California, and Mark Shuttleworth and others have been filing some interesting reports coming out of the conference. According to Shuttleworth, today will be "Cloud Day" at the meeting, with speakers including Richard Kaufmann, CTO of HP Cloud, Randy Bias of Cloud Scaling, and Mark Collier of Rackspace. Perhaps the most interesting points coming out of the summit so far, though, have to do with new market share claims for Ubuntu.

Canonical is, of course, getting a lot of notice for its new 12.x Ubuntu releases, as we covered here.  The new releases are part of the discussion at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), but there are some really surprising market share numbers coming out.

As Phoronix reports, Chris Kenyon, VP of sales and business development at Canonical, said that Ubuntu will soon ship on five percent of PCs, and threw in these numbers: "Eight to ten million units shipped last year world-wide...[and]..."Last year Ubuntu shipped on 7.5 billion dollars (presumably USD) worth of hardware."

Steadily, Canonical has been bringing the interface and compatibility conventions  in Ubuntu toward industry standards, which has caused controversy, especially in the case of the Unity interface. But to get to shipping on five percent of PCs, enterprises will have to buy into Ubuntu for users and major hardware makers will have to support the OS.

To put that five percent number in perspective, for decades Apple's market share on personal computers sat squarely at five percent, and look where Apple is now. 

One of the other interesting reports coming out of UDS is that Canonical is expanding its presence in China, including many physical stores featuring Ubuntu branding. This is going to be a transformative year for Canonical. Let's see where the numbers sit come December.